Marcial Gonzalez

Marcial González received a B.A. in English from Humboldt State University in 1992, an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Utah in 1994, and a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 2000. He is the author of Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form: Race, Class, and Reification (U Michigan, 2009), and is currently writing a book on representations of migrant farm laborers in Chicana/o literature. He is also the co-editor of Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (U Michigan, 2018). His current research and teaching interests include Chicana/o literature, migrant and immigrant literature, farm labor social movements, and Marxist literary theory. He also recently co-convened a faculty working group entitled “Critical Prison Studies in an Age of Mass Incarceration” at the Townsend Center for the Humanities. Professor González is the recipient of research fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.

Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form: Race, Class, and Reification
Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form draws on the Marxist theory of reification to undertake a theoretical study of the class-based construction of racial identity in the novels of four writers: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Danny Santiago, and Cecile Pineda. The book pays particular attention to the relationship between history and literary form. ....

"Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Theory of the Anti-imperialist Novel: The Re-appropriation of a Literary Form" in Ngugi in the American Imperium. Edited by Timothy J. Reiss. Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 2018. Forthcoming.

"Mass Incarceration and the Critique of Capitalism: A Working-Class Viewpoint in Ronald Ruiz's Happy Birthday Jesus." In Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism. Co-edited by Marcial Gonzalez and Carlos Gallego. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. Forthcoming.

"Herbert Marcuse's Repudiation of Dialectics: From Reason and Revolution to One-Dimensional Thinking." Science and Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis (2018). Forthcoming.

“Narrating the Inadmissible: Storytelling and Dialectical Form in Barefoot Heart and Children of the Fields.” Arizona Quarterly 70:2 (Summer 2014): 55-83.

“The Future as Form: Undoing the Categorical Separation of Class and Gender in Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia.” In Created Unequal: Class and the Making of American Literary Narrative, edited by Andrew Lawson (New York: Routledge, 2014): 215-228.

“Reception and Authenticity: Danny Santiago’s Famous All Over Town.” In New Directions in American Reception Study, eds. Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008): 179-194.

“A Marxist Critique of Borderlands Postmodernism: Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Chicano Cultural Criticism.” In Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth Century Literature of the United States, eds. Bill Mullen and Jim Smethurst (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003): 279-97.

Review of Bruce Neuberger's Lettuce Wars: Ten Years of Work and Struggle in the Fields of California (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013). Science and Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis 80.2 (April 2016): 276-279.

"Where Do Social Inequalities Come From?: Class Divides in Chicana/o Literature." Radical Teacher: A Socialist, Feminist, and Anti-Racist Journal on the Theory and Practice of Teaching 101 (Winter 2015): 15-20.

“The River Bottom Ranch” (fiction). In The Way We Work: Contemporary Writings from the American Workplace, eds. Peter Scheckner and Mary Boyes (Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008): 109-119.

Recent Papers Presented

“Point of View as a Structural Contradiction in Ronald Ruiz’s Happy Birthday Jesús.” Presented at the American Literature Association Conference. San Francisco, CA. May 27, 2016.

“We Are All People of Paper: A Farm Worker Critique of Neoliberalism.” Presented at “Twice Told Tales,” American Studies Conference. University of California, Berkeley. May 6, 2016.

“California Farm Workers, the State, and the Critique of Capitalism.” Presented at the Historical Materialism Conference. London, England. November 6, 2015.

“The City and the Country: Urban Space in a Farm Worker Novel.” Presented at The City and American Literature: A Symposium Sponsored by the American Literature Association. New Orleans, LA. September 12, 2015.

“Communism of the Will: Narrative Disclosures of a Mexican American Farm Worker.” Lineages of the Literary Left: A Symposium in Honor of Alan M. Wald. University of Michigan. March 22, 2013.

“U.S. Latina/o Studies and Marxism: Exploding the Parameters of the Impossible.” Haciendo Caminos: Mapping the Futures of U.S. Latina/o Literatures Conference. John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. March 8, 2013.

“‘She wondered how one could be so selfless’: Non-Alienated Labor and Planetary Feminisms in Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia.” Latino Literature/La Literatura Latina IV: A Bilingual Conference. University of California, Santa Cruz. November 30, 2012.

“Fredric Jameson’s Dialectical Synthesis: Marxist Literary Theory and Psychoanalysis.” Second Annual International Conference on Marxism and Psychology. Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico. August 10, 2012.

“Chicano/a Farm Worker Narratives: Storytelling in Lieu of Class Struggle.” Annual Conference, Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States (MELUS). Santa Clara University. April 22, 2012.

“Two Things Happened on Campus This Semester: Response to José David Saldívar’s Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico.” University Press Book Store, Berkeley, California. April 13, 2012.

“Children of the Fields: Representations of Work and School in post-1970 Chicano Farm Worker Narratives.” Center for Race & Gender, University of California, Berkeley. November 17, 2011.

“Tomás Rivera’s Tierra: A Farm Worker’s Story of Class Consciousness.” Seventh International Conference sponsored by Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society. University of Massachusetts at Amherst. November 7, 2009.

I am currently writing a book entitled “Farm Workers in Chicano Literature: The Making of Racial-Transnational Subjects,” which focuses on the lives and struggles of Mexican farm laborers as represented in Chicano narratives from 1960 to the present. This project seeks to link the experiences of U.S.-based Mexican farm workers to the building of an American empire in the twentieth century.